It was when Alonso Ruizpalacios was in London working as a dishwasher at the (now-extinct) Rainforest Cafe that he came up with the idea for La Cocina.
“I was a drama student and I’d just read the [1957] play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker and to make the work — which is tough, monotonous and very, very hard — bearable, I’d look at it through the creative lens of the play. If you see how a kitchen works, you realize it is much like the world, like [how] society works. Wesker says for Shakespeare all the world is a stage, whereas for him all the world is a kitchen.”
It was decades later, after success with Mexican films like Museo and A Cop Movie, that Ruizpalacios came back to the idea, taking The Kitchen as the jumping-off point for his English-language debut, transferring the action from late-’50s London to modern-day New York.
“I was a drama student and I’d just read the [1957] play The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker and to make the work — which is tough, monotonous and very, very hard — bearable, I’d look at it through the creative lens of the play. If you see how a kitchen works, you realize it is much like the world, like [how] society works. Wesker says for Shakespeare all the world is a stage, whereas for him all the world is a kitchen.”
It was decades later, after success with Mexican films like Museo and A Cop Movie, that Ruizpalacios came back to the idea, taking The Kitchen as the jumping-off point for his English-language debut, transferring the action from late-’50s London to modern-day New York.
- 2/18/2024
- by Scott Roxborough
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
If “the kitchen as war zone” has become a veritable sub-genre unto itself, Alonso Ruizpalacios’ “La Cocina” is the closest thing it has to its own “Gallipoli.” The trenches are made out of stainless steel instead of rotten wood, and the steady bombardment of orders comes with a greater threat of deportation than it does that of immediate death, but a job at The Grill just outside of Times Square is no less dehumanizing than a deployment along the frontlines at Suvla Bay, and it comes without any of the same hope for glory.
On the contrary, the soul-crushing system that compels undocumented immigrants to do this kind of work depends upon keeping them out of sight; not only from Ice, but also from the tourists who can only enjoy their rubber-fried lunch because they don’t have to look at the labor that went into making it. Capitalism is...
On the contrary, the soul-crushing system that compels undocumented immigrants to do this kind of work depends upon keeping them out of sight; not only from Ice, but also from the tourists who can only enjoy their rubber-fried lunch because they don’t have to look at the labor that went into making it. Capitalism is...
- 2/16/2024
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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